Perhaps unnoticed to the rest of the world’s Twitter community the Dutch had some fun this weekend about our international reputation for speed-skating. NBC’s Katie Couric covered the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics and informed the waiting world why the Dutch win so many medals at speed-skating. Her explanation: skating is an important mode of transportation in the Netherlands...

This morning I visited a historical site that once set the stage for the last try-out before real state colonialism started. It was here, on this beach in the South of the Canary Island of Lanzarote, that the Norman conquerors Juan de Bethencourt and Gadifer de la Salle landed in 1402. Close to the shoreline they built a castle and...

If you follow my tweets on @alex_verbeek you may have noticed that the familiar green frame of the photos is sometimes alternated with the red frames from the other, much smaller, Twitter account that I use: @planetary_sec. Those tweets with the red frames are about planetary security issues. It is about those issues where the planetary change that we are...

One of the reasons why I prefer to get most of my news through Twitter is its function as an independent barometer of what keeps us busy these days. The number of retweets of an article ,and the number of favourites that a tweet gets, are a good indicator. But it is especially the combination with the personal comments and...

A number of articles and reports were published this week about the huge challenges that we are facing on our small planet. It is too much to digest in one weekend, especially the more than 300 pages of the interesting third ‘Turn Down The Heat’ report of the World Bank. Here are some analyses and statistics that you don’t want...